The Letters of Shirley Jackson

by Shirley Jackson

  june can tell you all the things i can’t…she met michael’s mother; she will probably meet michael. she also met barry’s girl. my father played accordion for june and bought her a drink on tuesday; my mother took her to lunch and played bridge with her. knowing my family, i would say that june is quite a success. they are all very fond of her.

  june and i were just talking to mother and i told mother you thought you would come up this weekend and she said by all means come. she said you must come for dinner saturday night…june says if you do she will stay until sunday…unfortunately, we can’t offer you a place to stay that night, but you are certainly invited for dinner…mother is not kidding; she is sincerely anxious to have you, and unless barry has to go to the hospital i am very much in favor of it. please, please come. darling, i want to see you! there are so many things i want to talk to you about that i can’t put into letters, and of course no letter is adequate for telling you how i love you…please come, stanley.

  i love you so much so much so goddam MUCH!

  cat

  • • •

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

  july 14, 1939

  darling,

  yes, your third chapter arrived okay and alta is waiting for you to come here so she can collect eight cents from you.

  i read it six times and i think it is good. you have probably covered the subject as thoroughly as it is possible to cover any subject, and i think your outline-system makes it clearer. HOWEVER:

  1. y desires me to state that she (having read it carefully and with much admiration) is hurt. in your section on identical rhyme you completely forget to say what to y is very important: that in chaucer’s time and thereabouts identical rhyme was considered clever and technically superior. she points in breathless, gesturing horror to lines 17 and 18 of the prologue to the canterbury tales (which, in my copy, read “the holy blisful martir for to seke, that hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke…”) she also makes nasty remarks about how you SHOULD know that the idea comes from the French. and concludes that my god has he really READ skelton’s colyn cloute? i assured her that you had, that you knew all there was to know about identical rhymes and that you were the most wonderful man in the world.

  2. what bothers me most in your section about slant rhyme is that my idiot savant mind remembers vividly that in class brown pointed out…in either this poem or another…that the alliteration completed the rhyme…that bullet-heads in line one was rhymed not only with the ds in lads but that the h in heads was carried over in the hearts in line two, and the l of lads was repeated in bullet and in blind blunt…and so on…is this a peculiarity of this one poem or author or part of slant rhyme or am i crazy anyway?

  3. yes, i was surprised. more than that, i was frankly dumbfounded. i realize, moreover, that, besides being one of the few contemporary poets using cross rhyme, i only used it once because you invented it and never wrote any yourself…thus that is undoubtedly the only example you could find of cross rhyme. darling, it’s an astonishing and pleasant thing you have done to me, but of course i have an objection. i am sure that you have no intention of leaving it like that, so i am some reassured, but even in the copy you give brown i don’t think it’s very advisable. i think that brown, knowing me, would feel the whole book somewhat weakened by finding that you drew some of your examples from your friends.

  i adore your example from ogden nash.

  i am happy to see that you gave my friend lewis carroll a place among your immortals…along with me.

  and i think you are unnecessarily nasty about swinburne.

  but i think it is so good and i don’t think i ever realized that it would be as good as it is. i’m awfully excited and proud and i shall go around with a copy of the book (dedicated to your father) under my arm showing it to people and y in a rather startled fashion gives you her wholehearted respect because she also thought it was so good.

  and then this morning i get a discouraged letter from you saying what the hell you’ve finally run up against some work and please can you go out and drown yourself because you didn’t really expect you’d have any trouble and anyway no one should have to work writing a book. you are quite right, darling. you SHOULD go out and drown yourself and no one SHOULD have to work writing a book especially if he wants it to be a good book. yeah, and the third chapter was so good and went so well that what the devil can be the matter with the fourth chapter? o fool. darling, i love you very dearly but i wish you had some sense. if you write ten hours a day on the same subject and only stop writing long enough to hear some guy lecture from what you have been writing (i can see you taking a book to meals) it’s inevitable that sooner or later you should bog down and find that you’ve run out of words. you think you’re a superhuman maybe? o darling come to rochester and we will play chess and alta has the look in her eye which sometimes means lemon pie. IF she gets her eight cents: otherwise, she states flatly, you will dine on sardines. mother says that if you come saturday we have a guest room if you want to make your own bed and wash dishes sunday morning.

  as for me, i am still practicing the piano. i made a step in the right direction and am reading steinbeck’s longvalley which i find interesting and any one of the stories worth three of minceandmen (that mince is ernest’s idea of a joke god knows I didn’t do it!). today is friday and i have to go to the dentist for the last time; a week from tomorrow we leave. barry is recovered so we only postponed our trip for about three days really. i went sailing with michael last night…the first time i have seen him in weeks…and the storm warnings were up meaning it was dangerous for small boats to go out on the lake and michael’s is a VERY small boat. i know absolutely nothing about sailing, you know, and i had never been out in a wind like that. heaven help the poor people who aren’t sailors. that goddamned boat went tearing around the lake on one corner with me unhappily clambering around the outside (and i swear it was the outside which is the side which should be in the water only it wasn’t) taking down jibs and things. michael grew quite angry with me because i was all the crew he had and i kept starting to fall overboard and he would have to pull me back in and i got awfully wet and forgot about things like keeping the boat level and kept saying oooh looka the pretty sunset when i was supposed to be keeping the jib either in or out i forget. and i got the top of my head knocked off because something which michael said was the mnsl kept coming about when i didn’t come about and michael would say hard alee and i would say what only he always meant i should duck and i didn’t. and he kept doing funny things with sails and i would say what did you just do and he would say that is known as jibing it is impossible. and all the time that damn boat skimming happily along the water on one edge. i wouldn’t tell michael for anything in the world but i was so scared i nearly cried when i got back on nice dry land and then people came around and said you shouldn’t have gone out in that weather and michael would laugh lightly and say oh well she wanted to go, and i knew all the time that going was the LAST thing i wanted and then michael who had NO sense whatsoever fed me gin and then hot dogs and coca-cola and when i got home mother said i was probably starved so she gave me gingerbread and i don’t know whether it is the after effects of acute terror or so much gin and coca-cola but i don’t feel good but of course then there’s the dentist coming up very shortly. oh yes, and michael kept saying he wished i weighed more because then there would be less chance of our going over which did not make me feel as good as it might have.

  and y leaves tomorrow night having finished with the dentist and so she has come for dinner.

  come quick so i can talk because i can talk more than ernest can write.

  love,

  cat

  • • •

  “What can I do, dear? my life is just one predatory female after another—”

  [To Stanley Edgar Hyman]

 
thurs. july 20, 1939

  darling,

  i had been waiting so long for your letter, and it was so good to get it; after you get this you must address your letters to me

  c/o l.h. jackson stecher-traung litho. co. 600 battery street san francisco, calif.

  it’s a terrific address and practically impossible to remember; we leave early saturday morning, and actually got the trunks packed and sent off. this week is of course the hardest; people who have not spoken to me in three years call up and insist on giving luncheons for me before i leave (all of which i refuse: do you think i am a fool?) except yesterday when a friend of mother’s who fascinates me took us to clubs and things with a lot of ladies and i sat in a corner and was appalled. there was a story in yesterday, but i was too overwrought to notice it. it was one of those ever-to-be-damned things where the hostess orders the lunch first. i ate six rolls and four cups of coffee and people kept looking at me and saying why you’re not eating what IS the matter and mother would raise her eyebrows at me and i would dive into the lobster saying falsely oh i adore it i love it it’s so GOOD really it is. i would have taken a firm stand and demanded something else only mother was enjoying watching me so much…when they put the lobster in front of me she took a look at my face and indulged in a fit of coughing which left her with a very red face and nearly crying. she took me out afterwards and bought me a sandwich, laughing still. but that’s not what i started to tell you. it was about these women. the hostess was grace, who is a firm, masculine woman whose husband hasn’t said a word in six years. she won’t even let him drive the car (“now, fred, your NERVES, you know”) and grace believes that the reason she exists is to help people, even if she has to stun them with a few well-aimed blows to do it. then there was her married daughter isabel, who has been married for ten years, and who theoretically lives in chicago, only has spent the last two years in rochester with her eight-year old son, trying to tell people she hasn’t left her husband. isabel is a great believer in patent medicines, and her son takes iodine, cod liver oil, sun treatments, eats meat once a day, NO BREAD, and takes everything from midol to carter’slittleliverpills. she can’t understand why he’s spent most of his eight years in hospitals, so she gives him more medicines to cure him. once she took up christian science and he nearly died of pneumonia. then there was grace’s sister petey, who is the most likeable person in the whole damn family. she married a man whom they say was “interested in racing” after knowing him for three weeks; for a year they lived off money borrowed from friends, and then he died in an accident; “he’d been drinking, you know,” and petey has spent the rest of her life grinning over the look on her sister’s face when jim borrowed two hundred bucks from grace. petey states flatly that now she is looking for a rich old man who will marry her and then die. petey i like. the last was corinne, a hysterical woman with a fondness for young men and a weakness for rye. she wears three diamond rings. one was her engagement ring, which was intended for her sister, only corinne stepped in and took the guy away from her sister and married him, and her sister moved in on them, turned into an invalid who might die any minute, and has lived with and on them ever since. the other two rings are because corinne caught her husband with a blonde in chicago, and once she caught him with a brunette in new york, and every time corinne wears a new ring people know that she has caught up with her husband again.

  each of those women has a story i have tried to write and failed, and each of them represents a type of person i should like to see exterminated. i tell you about these people because i wanted you to see what they are like. they are ladies whom i have been taught to respect, even knowing about them, and i must respect them for the very false reason that they are older than i am. mother enjoys a dutiful friendship with them, and avoids them. the thing that was brought home to me so vividly yesterday was that these four, with mother and me, sat eating lobster at a fashionable club, all wearing broad-brimmed hats, all wearing the approved silk-dress-with-short-jacket which is considered correct for such occasions, all talking of husbands and children, clothes and other women, commenting in well-bred voices upon the ladies at the next table and tenderly modulating their voices so i (as the child) wouldn’t hear some particularly shocking pieces of news…and, stanley, these women were happy. that i shall never be able to understand. this is their life, the height of joy is sitting at a table and talking and eating lobster. this was what they had spent all their lives working up to, this was the reason they had married and had children and earned money…to be able to sit at a table and talk. the climax of four lives! i asked mother afterwards and she said perhaps it was because they never knew their lives were so empty. and she grinned at me and said “but we’ll go have a sandwich.”

  i read chapter four, don’t think it as good as three, but i like it. from what i have seen, that book looks pretty good. the only fault with four that i could find was the fact that it seemed incomplete; i couldn’t find just where, but in a few points it seemed that you had not said quite all that should be said, that you left out some trifling things which would have made it clearer. the only specific thing i can remember is in the quotation from tennyson about the bees; you did not say that the reason for the m-sound was to make it sound like the drowsy hum described; it is very unimportant to mention that, and yet it is such tiny things that give me the feeling of incompleteness. outside of that…which is of course only my delightful soul, looking always for something to pull apart…i think you’re doing okay. please don’t forget to send me the other chapters as you finish them. i have, incidentally, every confidence that the book will be published. it seems so exactly what they want, those stupid idiots who read, write, or regard poetry.

  kiss burke*39 on both cheeks for me; i am proud of him, he has inspired in you a happier and more interested letter than i have had all summer. i suspect that he has re-awakened your somewhat slackened interest in life. kiss him on both cheeks AND on the end of the nose; he has gotten you an invitation to brown’s. and please tell me more of what he says. for reasons of my own, i love that man very dearly. reasons of my own being, o curious one, that he has made you seem happier. which is enough of a task for any man to call a good summer’s work.

  alta basks in what you said about her cooking; mother says the hell with the bread and butter letter; she thinks you’re lying about having a good time but so long as you were comfortable it doesn’t matter anyway. she’s forgotten you already, and is more concerned with getting a credit card from the gas company. that has preoccupied her for three days and she sits around calling the gas company names because they want to know why the hell she wants a credit card. she doesn’t know why she wants it pop told her to get it so she’s trying.

  i will write you every chance i get (i think that will be every night when we stop) and please answer, because the one thing that will get me through this next two weeks is knowing that there will be letters from you when i arrive in san francisco. i am finally getting interested in going, now that it is so close. hell, i wouldn’t mind seeing yellowstone. so i go. and i love you and if you think i will not be counting the days until i get back you are crazy because i love you and i do not think it is a sound idea being away from you and i am in favor of never letting it happen again because i love you. jesus christ i do. in case you are interested there is a small fragment of a tear on the outside of the envelope; it is because i am going away from you and so far and i stopped to think about it and cried just very slightly on the envelope but mostly on the typewriter. it’s going to be a hell of a long month but anyway you’ll get a lot of work done, now, won’t you dear.